‘Assisted Suicide’ For Israel, and Other Clinton Legacies

(Washington, D.C.): News flash: The Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, has been, for all intents and purposes, incarcerated in a hotel in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. He will be kept there for some undetermined number of days. During this time, Mr. Barak will be held incommunicado from his people and the rest of the outside world, pursuant to conditions imposed by the Clinton Administration — conditions that are different in degree but not much in kind from those inflicted by the India Airlines hijackers.

Psychological ‘Peacemaking’

To be sure, unlike the victims of that terrorist action, the Prime Minister wants to be in Shepherdstown. He even wants to do what President Clinton demands — namely, the surrender of all of the Golan Heights to Syria. It is not yet clear, however, whether he is willing to take that step on what amounts essentially to Syrian dictator Hafez Assad’s terms.

The purpose of locking up Mr. Barak with the Syrian Foreign Minister, Farouk al-Shara and their American minders (Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, with periodic visits by President Clinton) is to create the sort of psychological pressure that gave rise to earlier Israeli capitulations at the Wye River Plantation. In Shepherdstown, the Clinton Administration will strive to recreate an environment of relentless meetings, artificial deadlines and accompanying sleep deprivation with the goal of “getting to ‘Yes,'” no matter what the cost.

As with Wye, the object will be to induce America’s friend to sacrifice territory, security and principle. As at Wye, the beneficiary will be a man who, like Yasser Arafat, has a long and bloody record of hostility toward both Israel and the United States and has yet to offer concrete evidence of his commitment to peaceful coexistence with the Jewish State.

And as with the Wye River deal, the United States’ negotiators will be prepared to lubricate the Israeli concessions with American commitments. Israel alone is said to expect some $18 billion in financial assistance. Both nations may be offered military and intelligence technology. President Clinton may even try to resuscitate the discredited idea of placing U.S. troops or other personnel on the Golan Heights to help keep the peace there.

‘Assisted Suicide’

Unfortunately, even if fully implemented, these promises cannot and will not compensate Israel for the vital margin of safety it will be giving up if the strategic high ground of the Golan is returned to Hafez Assad’s tender mercies. Relocated military units and settlers will not have the deterrent effect in the low lands of the Galilee that they do in their current position on the Heights overlooking Damascus. Alternatives to Israel’s current intelligence assets on the Golan are unlikely to be as reliable, particularly if operated by non-Israeli personnel.

And, as eleven former senior U.S. military commanders and civilian experts concluded in a study performed for the Center for Security Policy in 1994,¹ American and/or international forces will be at risk of terrorist and other attacks on the Golan without “enhanc[ing] Israeli security.” The authors — among them, the late Admiral Elmo Zumwalt — concluded: “One of the dangers of such a deployment is that it may create a false sense of security in Israel and discourage the investments necessary to address such risks. This would not serve U.S. interests, much less Israel’s.”

This is the crux of the matter: President Clinton’s campaign to complete a deal between Syria and Israel involving the surrender of all the Golan could prove suicidal for the Jewish State. If Israel decides to take such a step on its own, that is its business. If it does so on the basis of false assurances and unwarranted expectations that the United States will prevent Israel from coming to harm, however, the U.S. government would be guilty of assisted suicide, with Bill Clinton playing the role of Dr. Kervorkian.

Clinton’s Therapy and Counter-culture Agenda

If we are to believe a report in today’s New York Times, moreover, Bill Clinton’s determination to use everything from blandishments to coercive techniques to secure his “comprehensive” Middle East peace is animated by more than the standard “place in history” syndrome of a lame-duck president. According to the Times, Mr. Clinton’s deep-seated psychological needs — to which the Nation has been sickeningly overexposed during the past two years — are also at work. He is lonely in the White House without Hillary. He is determined to compete for attention with her campaign and Al Gore’s, both of which have hurt his feelings by declining presidential offers of help on the stump.

This pop psychoanalysis misses one other factor that appears to be driving the Clinton foreign policy agenda for 2000: He seems determined to fulfill a counter-culture design by changing, before leaving office, the “facts on the ground” with respect to virtually every one of this country’s recent and prospective adversaries — the group of rogue states and their big power sponsors that appear to be working increasingly in concert against U.S. interests and that comprise what former Under Secretary of State William Schneider has called “Club Mad.”

For example, the President has effectively normalized relations, or set in motion a process that will have that result, with Angola, Vietnam, Libya and North Korea. A deal between Barak and Assad would clear the decks for adding Syria to that list, something the President wants very much to do with Cuba as well before year’s end. He is also trying to romance the so-called “moderate” mullahs of Iran and is no longer seriously resisting others’ efforts to rehabilitate Saddam Hussein. China reads him as accommodating with regard to its ambitions towards Taiwan. And Vladimir Putin knows Russia will bear no real costs for its liquidation of Chechnya, its anti-American strategic axis with the PRC or its proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. All in all, there’s never been a better time to be an enemy of the United States — a reality that makes for a very ominous Clinton Legacy, indeed.

The Bottom Line

Mr. Clinton’s wholly inappropriate, and pathetic, self-promotion at the Millennium festivities on New Year’s Eve are but a taste of what is to come. He has already served notice that he intends to emulate former President Jimmy Carter’s self-appointed, freelancing diplomacy after he leaves office in a year’s time. The real danger is that between now and then he can do grave damage to U.S. security interests and those of its friends like Israel in his quest for affirmation, historical legitimacy and an ideological settling of accounts.

¹The participants in the study, entitled U.S. Forces on the Golan Heights: An Assessment of Benefits and Costs are: General John Foss, Commanding General, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (who had responsibility for U.S. forces in the Sinai). General Al Gray, Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps. Lieutenant General John Pustay (USAF, Ret.) Assistant to the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; President, National Defense University. General Bernard Schriever, Commander, U.S. Air Force Systems Command. Admiral Carl Trost, Chief of Naval Operations. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr., Chief of Naval Operations. Douglas J. Feith, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense; Middle East specialist, National Security Council; Frank Gaffney, Jr., Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Policy); Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense. Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Policy). Eugene Rostow, Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; Under Secretary of State (Political Affairs). Henry S. Rowen, former Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs); Chairman, National Intelligence Council, Central Intelligence Agency.